11–13 September 1943

BASILICA SAN GIOVANNI BATTISTA

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

Boxed inside the confessional, Osvaldo Tomitz slides open the grille to his right, and yearns to hear San Giobatta’s bells toll five. Instead he hears a well-known voice whisper, “Bless me, Padre, for I have sinned. My last confession was a week ago, and I missed Mass last Sunday.”

In Osvaldo’s opinion, Catarina Dolcino has not confessed a single genuine sin since he arrived in Sant’Andrea, but every Saturday old Rina proudly presents a minor misdeed for absolution. “Why did you miss Mass, figlia mia?”

“Padre, I was aching so much Saturday evening, I thought it might be typhus!” she whispers. “I decided not to go to Mass and maybe spread the sickness.”

“God does not expect you to come to Mass if you’re sick. You missed Mass for the good of others—”

“But I felt fine on Sunday morning. So it was a sin.”

“No, figlia mia, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, Padre, it was!”

“Look, this is not a debate. I am the priest, and I say you didn’t commit a sin when you missed Mass last Sunday.”

“Padre, I know it’s a sin!” Rina insists more loudly.

“And what seminary did you attend?” Osvaldo demands.

A patrician chuckle issues from another confessional a few meters away. “Surrender, Tomitz,” an authoritative male voice advises.

“That was the archbishop, you know,” the old lady informs Osvaldo unnecessarily. “You should do as you’re told.”

“Oh, all right. An Ave Maria,” Osvaldo mutters. “And a Pater Noster—for arguing!”

Rina recites a victorious Act of Contrition, and Osvaldo surrenders to a headache. He expected lay confessions to differ from those of seminarians, but old women never cease to astonish him. They are fawningly deferential to priests everywhere but in the confessional.

Before she rises to leave, Rina drops her voice to ask, “Did you think about what my neighbor asked you, Padre? You wouldn’t have to do anything. Suora Marta and Signora Leoni and I will take care of everything.”

“Signora,” Osvaldo says softly, “your friend’s son is a criminal—”

“But— no! I mean, yes, he was in prison, but he went for someone else. Remember in ’38, when every city had to send ten anti-Fascist Jews to jail? All we had in Sant’Andrea was one Communist and a lunatic, but what does Rome care? Ten is ten! Serafino Brizzolari picked men at random— how else could you do such a thing to your own neighbors? One of them was Tranquillo Loeb, Padre. A war hero! An attorney with a family, with responsibilities! Renzo wasn’t married, so he went to the Palazzo Municipale and—”

“Volunteered to go in his brother-in-law’s place?”

“He thinks nobody knows, but I hear things,” she says smugly. “The Leonis are good people, Padre. Lidia’s husband gave money to anyone who needed help. Catholic, Jew. And Emanuele never took the money back. He’d tell them to give it to someone else who needed help.” The old lady pauses cagily. “A lot of people put those coins in the poor box, Padre.”

“Go in peace, figlia mia,” Osvaldo commands firmly, but he adds, “I’ll do what I can in conscience.”

Sliding open the opposite grille, Osvaldo uses the movement to read his watch in a ray of light coming through a gap in the curtain. It’s nearly five, but the ones who wait until the last moment often have the longest list of the most repetitive sins and the most self-serving excuses. It’s the war, Padre. Always the war. Death is everywhere. Sordid solace beckons. The mind should focus on the soul’s nearness to eternity, but bodies yearn to experience each pleasure life offers— now, before it is too late. Babies are conceived while husbands are at the front; wives do desperate things. Lying and theft become a way of life. Rationing, the draft, a thousand deprivations… Osvaldo tries to be compassionate, but he can feel himself slipping into priestly middle age, becoming snappish and judgmental as his capacity for caritas erodes. A child next, he prays. Suffer the little children to come unto Thee, Lord. Grant me the blessing of hearing their earnest if unreliable promises to be better next week.

Instead he hears the impact of a heavy man’s knees, followed by the stifled groan when a bad leg takes up its half of this body’s burden. Serafino Brizzolari. A middle-level bureaucrat at the Palazzo Municipale. The man who sent Renzo Leoni to jail.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I missed Mass because the air raids kept me awake all night. It’s been a savage week, and I was too tired to go to church on Sunday.” (Poor thing! Osvaldo thinks, then berates himself for sarcasm.) “I skipped grace before meals ten times, and missed grace after meals about thirty times. I’m a busy man, Padre. I am often called away from my table by matters of state.” (Yes, yes! Osvaldo moans mentally. Come to the point.) “— impatient with my grandchildren about twenty times, and with my wife about ten times.”

Why, Osvaldo wonders testily, are sins always divisible by five?

“I was short a couple of times with my assistant, but he really is an ass! I had impure thoughts, and I enjoyed them.” (Finally! We’re getting somewhere…) “I forgot my morning prayers about twenty times and my night prayers about thirty times. I touched myself impurely, but didn’t enjoy it.” (There’s a lie, Osvaldo thinks, but he lets it pass.) “I used God’s name in vain about fifty times and slept with someone other than my wife three times, and I cheated a man on some black-market meat, but his flour turned out to be wormy anyway, so he was cheating me, too. What can I tell you? There’s a war on. For these and all my sins of my past life, I am heartily sorry, especially for being bad-tempered around my grandchildren.”

Osvaldo takes a deep breath. “Let’s go back to that one about sleeping with someone other than your wife, shall we?”

“Padre, my marriage is empty! My wife is—”

“This is your confession, not your wife’s. And in any case, a man who tends someone else’s garden can hardly complain when his own has weeds. How long has this been going on? A year? A year and a half?”

“Really, Padre, it’s not your place—”

“Don’t tell me my place, figlio mio. I am your confessor!”

“I shall speak to the archbishop about this, Tomitz!”

“Do that,” Osvaldo suggests with acid courtesy. “Better yet, go to the archbishop for your confession and see what he has to say when a man seeks absolution each week with no remorse and every intention of committing the sin again.” Leather creaks as Brizzolari shifts uneasily on the kneeler, and suddenly Osvaldo understands. “He already told you to break it off, didn’t he! So you came to someone new, and stupid, who would require eighteen months to see through you!” Osvaldo wants to reach through the scrim and shake the man. “Can you possibly believe that God is fooled by such games?” To the silence beyond the grille, he says, “A rosary, my son! And you must break it off with that woman. Now make a good Act of Contrition.”

Osvaldo listens to the grudging prayer of repentance. Brizzolari leaves in a huff. Osvaldo gives lurking penitents five more minutes to work up their courage and spends the time trying to convince himself that his own anger was righteous, not just indignation at being played for a fool.

No one else comes. He pulls the curtain aside, stretches cramped muscles as thirty nuns begin to chant their rent-in-perpetuity: a rosary each evening for the soul of Ludovico Usodimare, the pirate-prince who built San Giobatta and Immacolata convent with a modest portion of his stupendous plunder.

Renzo Leoni was right: the basilica is not much to look at. Its plaster swags and plump putti are indifferently molded, though cheerfully painted. Above a boisterous baroque altar, John the Baptist and an unblushing Usodimare anachronistically flank the risen Christ, portrayed as an improbably young man triumphant in the Easter dawn, happy as a soccer forward who’s just netted a header. Osvaldo’s favorite fresco is an Annunciation: androgynous angel to the left, pubescent girl to the right, a sunburst Dove hovering between them. The composition is sentimental, but it captures the moment when the Virgin’s shock gives way to a secret pleasure. Was I too hard on Brizzolari? Osvaldo asks her in his heart. What could I have said that would not have encouraged him to go on sinning?

Quieting his thoughts, he hears an answer. He knows he’s doing wrong. Tell him what the right thing is! Go home to your wife. Find a rose, and bring it to her. Treat her with the attention and care you gave your mistress. Love can bloom again. Women are forgiving, and so is God. Earn back your wife’s trust, and our Lord’s.

He envies the shoptalk of cobblers and waiters. Tailors and barbers can laugh at customers’ quirks, exchange trade secrets, discuss technique. Osvaldo Tomitz, who must remain silent about his work, never returns directly to the rectory after hearing confessions. He regrets antagonizing the rectory housekeeper by being late for supper, but he needs fresh air and sunlight on his face before joining his brothers in Christ at the table.

Outside he merges with the crowds that stream away from the port. Women, children, and old men queue for trams and cram funiculars ascending the cliffs to smaller inland towns. The Allies mean to deprive Hitler of anything northern Italy can produce, and their air raids have intensified since the armistice. Porto Sant’Andrea becomes airless and lightless at dusk, its windows sealed with blue paper so the coast won’t contrast with the sea, leading bombers toward docks, ironworks, steel mills, and warehouses. When military targets are hard to identify, civilian neighborhoods suffer the consequences. Anyone who can leave, does.

The menace is no longer from the air alone. By order of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Italian males between fifteen and fifty are being force-marched south to build German defenses, or stuffed into freight cars and shipped north to German factories. The only men who dare show themselves flaunt black shirts and boots. After a forty-five-day eclipse, the fascisti are back, loud and laughing, immune to German labor sweeps.

Radio loudspeakers mounted on the corners of public buildings crackle to life. Republican broadcasts begin with the state hymn, “Giovinezza,” and with a travesty of prayer. “I believe in God, Lord of heaven and earth. I believe in justice and truth. I believe in the resurrection of Fascist Italy. I believe in Mussolini and in Italy’s victory.” Ignoring this ridiculous credo, Osvaldo sprints up long stair-streets, leaving town by way of the Genoa gate. In the distance, a rabble of boys plays soccer on a makeshift pitch, raising dust in the late afternoon’s heat. Already sweating, Osvaldo yearns to cast off the black serge cassock, to rid his nose of its smell, his shoulders of its weight, his legs of its tangle. That’s out of the question, of course. Even so, he intends to hike up his skirts and scuffle for a football in the heat-burnt grass, taking such pleasure in the sport it seems as confessable as old Rina’s missed Mass.

A croupy cough erupts behind him. Osvaldo whirls.

Wearing a civilian suit, and sober, Werner Schramm bends at the waist and coughs until he clears some obstruction. “You’re the one… who speaks German,” he says, breathless. “I want you… to hear my confession.”

“Herr Doktor Schramm, this isn’t the time or place—”

Schramm’s spine uncoils. “How do you know my name?”

“We read your papers.”

“You read—? How dare you!”

Osvaldo feels his patience snap like a mast in a storm. “You were pig-drunk! Did you expect to sleep it off on a pew, like a swine in mud? You behaved disgracefully toward Suora Marta! You were rude and profane in the house of God!”

“I— my apologies,” Schramm stutters. “I have no head for liquor.”

Fifty meters away, the soccer players are staring. “Go on with your game,” Osvaldo shouts. “All right,” he mutters to Schramm. “We can return to the basilica and—”

“No! I mean— Please, I need to see your face.” Schramm looks around and gestures toward an olive grove clinging to a nearby terrace, high above the coast. “Over there,” he orders, adding stiffly, “if you will.”

A tethered goat grazing beneath the silver-gray leaves lifts its horned skull to consider the newcomers. Gulls wheel in air scented by wild thyme and rosemary. Eye level with Osvaldo, the birds cock their heads in passing and inspect the priest with brainless optimism. Food is scarce; scraps for gulls are nonexistent. Don’t look at me, Osvaldo thinks irritably. Go find a Franciscan!

“Does heaven exist?” Schramm demands.

Osvaldo blinks. “Yes. Of course.”

“One who dies without the stain of sin on his soul goes to heaven?”

“Herr Doktor—”

“Children under the age of reason are not responsible. They cannot sin. If they die, they go to heaven. Yes or no?”

“If they were baptized.”

“What of souls trapped in bodies that can never achieve reason?” Schramm asks in the same peremptory tone. “The feebleminded? The mad? They, too, go directly to heaven. Their stainless souls are freed by death. They are with God.”

Osvaldo frowns. “Yes,” he says more slowly.

“And if they are not baptized? What about—”

“Herr Schramm, if you wish to engage in doctrinal debate—”

“A priest’s office is to instruct the faithful!” Schramm shouts.

The grazing goat shies away, and the German is swamped by another coughing fit. Disgusted by the pulpy noise, Osvaldo looks away to hide his grimace. The paroxysm passes. Schramm leans against the terrace wall, wipes his mouth on a handkerchief, reaches into his suit coat for cigarettes. Osvaldo accepts one, but he puts it in his pocket, unwilling to smoke during a sacrament. “These can’t be good for you,” he remarks. “Not with a cough like that.”

“They’re poison,” Schramm says flatly, “but useful camouflage.” He pulls in the smoke, then makes the little choking sound that comes when one tries to suppress a cough. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he says when he can speak again. “I have murdered 91,867 people.”

Osvaldo laughs. You’re joking, this laugh says. You can’t be serious! “Ninety-one thousand,” he repeats. “Eight hundred…”

“And sixty-seven. Yes.”

The number is absurd, but Schramm does not laugh. He does not smile and exclaim, “Oh-ho! I really had you going there for a minute, didn’t I, Father!” He sits, smoking, eyes tracking the flight path of a gull as it veers away, toward the sea.

Confused, Osvaldo attempts to divide 91,867 by 365, but he has no facility with numbers. Make it easier, he tells himself. Ninety thousand divided by 300 would be three hundred a day, for a year. If Schramm were a bomber pilot… But a doctor? “How?”

“Barbiturates at first. Luminal tablets dissolved in tea. Morphine, scopolamine, if a child didn’t die quickly. Then there was a study at Brandenburg, comparing methods. Gas was faster, more humane—”

“Gas?” Osvaldo has no idea what this can mean.

“Carbon monoxide. Twenty, thirty at a time. At Belzec, they decided— It took too long. So we went to prussic acid. I didn’t drop the canisters myself, but I decided who— There were trains, and doctors had to decide. You sent them left or right. There were thousands. I was required to decide.” Schramm stops, swallows. “I asked for a transfer out of the extermination camp, but—”

Osvaldo shakes his head as though to clear it. “Extermination?”

“I had done research in nutrition, so I was reassigned to Kremer’s project at the Monowitz labor camp. There were two medics. They were needlessly— there was no reason to be cruel! So I started doing the intracardiac injections myself. Phenol is quick, and has no effect on the viscera.”

“The viscera?”

“To describe the anatomical effects of starvation, it was necessary to preserve organ integrity. Those people were doomed, either way. At least we could derive useful data, but— It was too much, too far! I asked for a transfer again—”

“Herr Schramm, what has this to do with mental defectives—?”

“You’re mixing things!” Schramm cries. “That was the euthanasia program.”

“Euthanasia?”

“Of the feebleminded, the deformed, the hopelessly ill. You’re mixing things! I was a doctor in a state hospital in the late thirties. You have to understand! If their families didn’t want such children, why should the nation? If healthy young men died for their nation in war, why shouldn’t their hopeless sisters and brothers do the same?”

Head aching, Osvaldo tries to follow, but it’s as though he is listening to a conversation taking place on the other side of a plate-glass window, and—

The window! he thinks, recognizing the sudden, impossible feeling of having experienced this before. His first week in Sant’Andrea: he was sitting in a caf'e, sipping an espresso, reading La Gazzetta dello Sport. There was a tremendous bang! Flame and smoke erupted from the docks. Wreckage and dust descended. He thought, A steam engine in one of the ships has exploded! But there was a second, a third detonation. Explosions— closer and closer, moving uphill from the port toward the caf'e. All around him, patrons and waiters dove for cover. They shouted that it was an air raid. He knew they were right. He was certain that the concussion from the next bomb would shatter the window, cut him to pieces. He was going to die in a puddle of coffee, but he simply couldn’t move. He just stood there like a statue until the planes passed over, and the city burned in relative peace.

The German’s words fall like bombs on Osvaldo Tomitz now. Words he has never heard before. Concepts that paralyze him. Numbers that strike him speechless. Places with names so foreign he cannot remember the sounds even moments after he hears them. All over the Reich, there are slave-labor camps— thousands of them, manned by millions who work like beasts on diets of eight hundred calories a day until they die of starvation or disease. Communists, perverts, Slavic prisoners of war, even a few of the healthiest Jews, but not many. The Jews aren’t being resettled either. They’re being killed in industrial plants, specially built for the extermination of large populations and for efficient disposal of bodies. The death camps specialize in Jews. Gypsies, too, but mostly Jews. Cities and towns— whole countries are scoured for Jews, block by block, house by house. Italy will be next.

“I didn’t mean to— I never thought— But you see, I was compromised, because of the T-4 program, and I had to…” Schramm passes a hand over his eyes. “I requested transfer to the eastern front. To be a doctor for a combat unit, there was some honor in that.”

“Ninety-one thousand, eight hundred. And sixty-seven,” Osvaldo whispers. “How can you know the number so exactly?”

“Records were kept. Meticulous records, at the camps. And at the hospital, the death certificates were fraudulent— I lied,” Schramm confesses. “I told the families… this was part of my medical training! I followed a guide. A written guide. I was to tell parents their child had died of pneumonia, or septicemia. Later, in Russia, it was worse, almost. Thousands and thousands, executed nine at a time by firing squad. There were breakdowns. Soldiers cried and begged to be excused. The officers would scream abuse at them— they were a disgrace to the German race! To the Vaterland! So they’d fire at the targets, with tears streaming down their cheeks—”

“Targets?”

“Not all of them cried. Some enjoyed their work— they got extra rations, all the liquor they could hold.”

More bombs fall. A noncommissioned officer who held shrieking Jewish toddlers by the hair, shooting them in the head and laughing at the bloody skullcap left dripping in his fist. A Ukrainian volunteer systematically beating people to death with his rifle butt while the SS watched, stunned by his enthusiasm. Living bodies cut apart with bayonets in search of swallowed jewels.

“I am neither a sadist nor a thief,” Schramm insists. “I only wanted— I wanted to make things better.” He stops, and swallows. “I killed no one at the front,” he says firmly, “but there were 632 children in the state hospital, and 220 in the hunger research. I was stationed at Auschwitz for 26 days, and had depot duty for eight days of that time. The average throughput was 9,000 a day. I signed off on 91,015 head. This totals 91,867.”

Osvaldo looks at Schramm, at the goat, at the diamond-studded sea sparkling in the distance. Mind racing, he tries to imagine what he can possibly say to this… this demon. His mouth opens. No words emerge. He lifts his hands, drops them, and begins to walk away.

“Wait!” Schramm calls. “You must— What is my penance?”

Osvaldo turn and stares. “Mein Gott, Schramm, what did you expect? Rosaries?” Bending suddenly, leaning hard on hands that clutch his knees, Osvaldo chokes back vomit. Trembling, he lifts his eyes. “Shoot yourself.”

“What?”

“You wanted a penance.”

“You’re mad! That’s crazy—”

Osvaldo straightens, advances, finger pointed like a gun. “You call yourself a Catholic? You are a disgrace to your faith! Nothing less than executing yourself can possibly atone for what you have done! Commit suicide and condemn yourself to hell. I am your confessor! Obey me, you miserable coward!”

Schramm backs away, looking for someone to whom he can appeal. “You— you’re a priest! Suicide is a sin! You have no right—”

“Ah,” Osvaldo breathes. “So you are capable of disobeying an order when you know it to be wrong.” He shakes his head. “God forgive you. I can’t.”

“What are you saying? You can’t—”

“For absolution, there must be sincere contrition!” Osvaldo cries. “If you’d come to me after three, or even four murders—” Again, the strange laughter of disbelief and shock escapes him. “But to kill, and go on killing? To kill 91,867! Why now, Schramm? Why confess now?”

The German will not meet his eyes, and in the silence Osvaldo Tomitz makes sense at last of the flushed cheeks, the terrible thinness, the horrifying cough. “You’re dying,” he says. “You have tuberculosis.” Schramm flinches. Osvaldo pities him for an instant. “What you feel is not contrition, my son. It’s dread. I can’t absolve a fear of hell.”

“But— what should I do?”

The priest walks away without a backward glance.

“Please!” Schramm shouts, his voice cracking. “Someone has to tell me what—”

The hemorrhage is sudden, but not unexpected. The revolting sensation of fluid rising to fill the pharynx comes first. The taste of iron and acid. Schramm sinks to his knees, leans forward, gagging. Salt tears form tiny momentary lakes in the bloody dust. Hot wind rushes past his ears, roaring like a tide, but he does not drown. This time.

RABBINICAL RESIDENCE

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

“You promise?” Angelo Soncini asks as his mother tucks him in. “A brother this time?”

“I can’t promise, but— yes, I think it’s going to be a boy.” Sitting on the edge of his bed, Mirella takes her son’s hand, which is reasonably clean for a change, and rests it on her belly. “Wait… Did you feel that? This baby is just like you were! All knees and fists and feet, kicking to get out!”

Angelo looks up slyly. “I know a kid who says babies come out the mamma’s mouth.”

Mirella has prepared herself to be honest, if indirect. “No, my treasure. There’s a special opening between a lady’s legs that God has made for just such a purpose. When the baby’s ready, he comes out down there.” Judging from the look she gets, this is a far worse solution to the puzzle than anything Angelo and his young consultants have discussed.

Angelo shakes his head. “That can’t be right. Babies are too big for that. Unless—” His eyes bulge. “Do ladies’ legs come off?”

“It might be convenient if they did,” she admits. “The important thing is, the babies are born, and everyone welcomes them into the family. Especially big brothers! No more questions! Say your prayers!”

Her own prayers are simpler than the Hebrew ones her son rattles through. No raids tonight, please, God! Let my child sleep soundly. Let him dream of baby brothers, and not Altira’s death.

So different was her second pregnancy from her first, Mirella Soncini worried almost from the start that something was wrong. If Angelo was like a boxer within her, the new child was like a butterfly, like a breeze on lace curtains. Fluttering, shivering, humming. “The baby almost never kicks,” Mirella said, but everyone told her not to fret.

Born at dawn, her daughter quickly flushed as rosy as the light that greeted her, and settled into Mirella’s arms like a nestling. That was when everyone else began to worry. Mirella didn’t care. In defiance of tradition, she named her daughter Altira, Hebrew for fear not!

“All she does is cry and make smells,” Angelo complained. “She’s almost two and she still can’t do anything! Why do you like her better than me?”

“I love you both the same,” Mirella insisted. “And you should love your little sister, too! Altira can’t do as much as you because she’s so little.”

But Altira could cuddle. Altira could gaze at her mother with measureless love. She could smile shyly, almost coyly, and throw her face onto Mirella’s breast with a surfeit of affection, patting soft flesh with hands like small pink starfish. So sweet… But this will be another son, Mirella thinks. A boy, all energy and push.

She makes her ponderous way to Iacopo’s office and emits a quiet growl of exasperation at the stacks of paperwork piled on the dining table after a late meeting with the congregation officers. Hoping to reform Iacopo when they first married, Mirella proudly provided her new husband with a nice, big filing cabinet. Iacopo dutifully filled it with correspondence and scribbled notes, but the organization remained more geological than alphabetical. Several arguments later, he declared, “There are two kinds of people, cara mia: pilers and filers. Ours is a mixed marriage.”

“Angelo’s in bed,” she says, standing at the threshold of his study. “Shall I wait up?”

Slowly, visibly, Iacopo’s mind shifts from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, from Renaissance Hebrew to modern Italian. Mirella waits patiently, breathing in the dust and leathery scent of five thousand volumes. They are her husband’s tools and his colleagues, these books. Three millennia of prophets and poets, dramatists and historians, theologians and sages keep him company late into the night. Every surface is laden with texts, laid open or bristling with bookmarks.

When at last Iacopo’s eyes focus on his wife, they warm, and in the resonant, melodic baritone that won her, he recites, “ ‘His heart, aroast upon the spit of longing, turns. He burns! O gaze, gazelle, down from your window, where the tender passion of your gallant yearns—’ ”

Mirella laughs. “Pardon me, a gazelle with a window?”

“I’m just the translator, not the poet! You can come in, you know. It’s only my office, not the holy of holies.”

“And take a chance on moving some crucial scrap of paper from one heap to another?” She shakes her head.

“You look tired. Beautiful,” he adds, “but tired. Go to bed, cara mia. I want to finish this stanza, but you should get some rest.”

“In a few minutes. First, I need to clear away a mess someone left in the dining room.”

The office door clicks closed. Iacopo Soncini stares a few moments at the rich figuring of its wood. Then it’s back to old Pappus, the lovesick innkeeper who yearns for his gazelle. Who now looks into the mirror, and “sees his fallen face and form, his belly—” No. Not belly. “— his paunch that pines.” Mirella would scoff, A paunch that pines? But that’s what the poet wrote, and he liked alliteration. “And eyes that spill uncounted tears. He feels his bald spot’s chill; his stray gray locks hang damp with dew…”

Iacopo lays down his pen, stretching out the kinks in his own middle-aged back. Poor old Pappus, he thinks. If your gazelle’s father permits the marriage, what will become of such a mismatch?

A knock on the front door interrupts his thoughts. Iacopo glances at the clock. It’s past curfew. He removes his pince-nez, slipping it into his vest pocket. A German rabbi, beaten in his doorway by SA hoodlums, was blinded by his own shattered spectacles. Seven years since Iacopo heard that story, and still it haunts him.

Unburdened by such fear, Mirella has already opened the door— not to a Fascist thug but to a pale priest. “Buona sera,” she says a little blankly. He looks familiar, but there are so many priests in Sant’Andrea. With his forgettable face and anonymous black cassock, this one has failed to make an impression. “Padre…?”

“Tomitz. Osvaldo Tomitz.”

Hurrying down the hall, Iacopo leans past Mirella to welcome the priest with a warmth meant to offset Mirella’s confusion. “Buona sera, Don Osvaldo!”

Mirella presses one hand to her forehead and the other to her belly. “Forgive me, Don Osvaldo. My mind is a sieve these days!”

Making small talk, Mirella ushers their apologetic visitor down the entry hall. No, she tells him, both of us were awake. But, of course! You’re welcome here at any time. Fine, grazie, and you? Yes, very soon now— at the end of the month, most likely…

Iacopo smiles when Don Osvaldo looks around the Soncini’s salon. The furniture is lacquer-sleek, the artwork cubist, the chandelier a stark Venini. “You expected something more traditional,” he notes when Mirella goes to the kitchen. “All new, when Mirella and I married. Traditional is good, I told her. Nothing looks more dated—”

“— than whatever was breathlessly fashionable eight years ago!” Mirella says, returning from the kitchen with a bottle of wine and three glasses on a tray. “I wish we had more to offer, but this is a very nice sangiovese.” She frowns. “Don Osvaldo, is something wrong?”

“Mirella’s right,” Iacopo agrees. “You’re white as snow!”

“Rabbino, you must— Something is—” The unremarkable face twists, and Tomitz looks back toward the door. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come. There’s nothing I can say!”

“Drink this, Padre,” Mirella urges. “Can I get you something stronger?”

“Mirella.” There is, in Iacopo’s silken voice, a note of soft command. His wife takes one step back. “I have been meaning to invite you to see our synagogue, Don Osvaldo,” Iacopo says lightly. “Perhaps now would be convenient.”

Tumblers rattle. Well-oiled hinges glide. Footsteps echo on marble, but this is not a lonely sound. For both men, there is comfort in the familiar emptiness of a place of worship at night.

“After the Great War, everyone felt it was time to make some visible statement of our place in Italy. The congregation raised the money for a new synagogue in the twenties. Construction began in the thirties. We were able to employ many men during the Depression.” Iacopo opens the etched-glass door to the main sanctuary of Scuola Ner Tamid and switches on the electric chandeliers.

Osvaldo pulls in a little gasp. Carrara walls reflect brilliant light from gleaming silver fixtures. A raised central altar’s lectern shelters under a sort of indoor gazebo fashioned of clean-lined chestnut. As modern as the Soncinis’ home, the sanctuary’s beauty arises from gracious proportions, and fine materials painstakingly polished.

“I am told the style is Italian rationalist,” the rabbi says, turning the lights off. “Personally, I prefer the little chapel.” He leads Don Osvaldo down a dark staircase. “When the congregation moved uptown from Porto Vecchio— watch your step, Padre— they saved the bima and the ark from a synagogue that was dedicated in 1511. We re-created its chapel down here.” He unlocks another door. “Let there be light!”

Illuminated by antique lanterns discreetly electrified, the small square room is as stunningly ornamented as the main sanctuary was serenely unadorned. Heavily carved walnut panels enclose it; their dark riches set off the gleam of precious metals: embossed, chased, engraved. Silver oil lamps on fine gilt chains hang from a vaulted ceiling with a frescoed sky, lapis blue and studded with tiny six-pointed stars leafed in gold.

A stately candelabrum, tall as a man and branched like an espaliered tree, guards what appears to be an ornate wardrobe inlaid with ivory flowers and jade ivy. “That’s the ark,” Iacopo explains, “where the Torah scrolls rest.” He takes a seat on a mid-Renaissance chair opposite the menorah. “We are commanded to beautify the elements of worship. Our ancestors fulfilled that mitzvah admirably, in my opinion.” He motions toward a pew. “Prego, Don Osvaldo. What we say here is heard by God alone.”

The priest’s silence is different now.

“You have been a good friend to our community, Don Osvaldo,” Iacopo says, giving the other man time. “I am aware that since you took up your post at San Giobatta, you have encouraged His Excellency and the good sisters at Immacolata to cooperate with the Jewish relief committee. You yourself have helped us find housing for displaced Hebrews. Naturally, when such a friend comes to me with a grave concern, I am distressed. I wish to know if there is some way I can be of help to you.”

Osvaldo’s lips part, but still no words emerge.

“It must be difficult to hear confessions,” Iacopo remarks, one clergyman to another. “Listening, hour after hour, to the shameful and humiliating secrets of others. It must feel like an assault or the onset of an illness. To accept such a burden, to take it onto one’s own shoulders—”

“But I am not alone in the confessional!” Don Osvaldo cries, his face twisting. “I am in the presence of One who died in agony to redeem the sins of the world!”

“And yet, you weep,” Iacopo observes, offering a handkerchief.

“Rabbino, I have refused a sinner absolution.”

Taken aback, Iacopo asks, “Is that possible?”

“I–I don’t know. It may be a sort of heresy. But what I heard was so terrible that— that…”

“You doubt your savior’s ability to forgive it?”

“Or my worthiness to be His priest.” Osvaldo moves from place to place in the little room. “What if a penitent is mad? Or deluded. What if he feels such guilt for what he’s done in war that he believes himself guilty of other unspeakable acts?”

“Don Osvaldo, why have you not gone to the archbishop with these questions?”

“Because— because what I heard is of great importance to you, and to your congregants. To all of us who—” Tomitz stops. “I’m sorry. Even to say this much—”

“May be breaking the seal of the confessional. Perhaps,” Iacopo suggests carefully, “it would be permissible to tell me what you think I might do, were I in possession of the information you cannot convey?”

“You would immediately advise your congregation to—” Don Osvaldo hesitates, but when he speaks again his voice is firm. “To avoid arrest and deportation.”

“I am not aware that we are doing anything to invite arrest, Don Osvaldo. The king himself says Italy has no more exemplary citizens than the Jews.”

“The king himself has fled the Germans— as you should! Tranquillo Loeb was right, Rabbino. You must all leave as soon as possible.”

“And where do you suggest we go, Don Osvaldo?”

“Someplace— anyplace you’re not known. Into the hills, the mountains! You could pass for Catholics. I–I’ll get you baptismal certificates. You wouldn’t have to be baptized, I swear it!”

“A generous offer, Don Osvaldo, and we Italians could conceivably melt into the countryside. But what of the refugees who’ve come to us for shelter? What would become of them?”

Tomitz sags onto a pew and puts his face in his hands.

“I am working with a German refugee,” Iacopo tells him quietly. “He’s almost thirteen, studying to become bar mitzvah— a ceremony rather like confirmation. For nearly two years, he and his family have lived in the basement of a bombed-out building near here. They look Jewish, whatever that means. They speak almost no Italian. They have no money. This boy’s only possession is a stamp album. Every week, he shows it to me before we begin our study. Three hundred stamps, from all over the world. The Philippines, Bolivia, Tunisia. Algeria, America. Switzerland. Mauritius. Spain, Portugal. Shanghai, Hong Kong, Japan, India. Venezuela, Cuba, the West Indies. I asked him once, ‘How did you amass such a collection?’ And he answered, ‘They’re from letters my father received from embassies when we were trying to emigrate from Germany.’ ” The priest looks up, and Iacopo asks, “Can I abandon that boy, when the whole world has rejected him?”

Don Osvaldo exhales raggedly. “No. Of course not, but surely you have heard the rumors of—”

“Precisely! Rumors! Frightening stories cost the Reich nothing, Padre. They’re far more popular than raising taxes. When a Jew leaves German territory, his property is confiscated to finance the Nazi war—”

“Rabbino, what if there were an eyewitness? If I brought someone who will tell you what is happening to Jews who are—”

“Don Osvaldo, what could I do with such testimony?” Iacopo demands, voice rising. “Terrify my congregants? Foment panic? The doors of the world are closed to us! If all you offer is more fear— O Dio! What now?”

“Open up!” someone yells, pounding on the street-level door. “Rabbino, are you in there? Open up!”

The rabbi cringes at the voice, but with anger, not with fear. Muttering apologies, he leaves the chapel, taking the stairs two at a time. Strides across the synagogue lobby. Throws open the door and grabs a man’s arm, snarling, “Quiet, you fool! We have enough trouble without you making a public scene.”

Flung roughly into the vestibule, Renzo Leoni stumbles into the startled priest’s arms. “Don Osvaldo!” he cries. “A pleasure to see you again.” He lowers his voice conspiratorially. “If you’ve decided to convert, you’ve picked a very poor time for it.”

“You’re drunk!” Iacopo accuses.

Convicted by his own helpless laughter, Leoni leans against a wall and slides toward the marble floor. “I am not,” he allows, “at my best. That, however, is not the topic I wish to discuss! Mirella sent me—”

“You went to my home? You spoke to my wife in this condition?”

“My dear Rabbino Soncini,” Leoni says, summoning fluid formality from an unwilling tongue, “as a matter of strict fact, I was looking for you. And permit me to observe that if you’d been at home, with your wife, instead of spending your evening with Don Osvaldo here, Mirella would not have been forced to dispatch a reprobate like me to inform you that she is in labor.”

The rabbi stares. “She can’t be. It’s too soon.”

“I’m inclined to accept the lady’s authority on such matters.”

Osvaldo steps outside in time to see Mirella Soncini’s belly emerge from her doorway, followed a moment later by the part of her that is pulling on a cardigan. “Iacopo!” she calls loudly. “It’s time!”

Her shout galvanizes the neighborhood. Shutters open like windows in an Advent calendar. Heads appear. Words of encouragement sail into the night air. Wearing dressing gowns, Rina Dolcino and Lidia Leoni join Mirella, who motions for her pajama-clad son to come outside. “I’m getting a baby brother,” the little boy announces as the ladies usher him into their apartment building.

Osvaldo waves to let them know the news has reached the signora’s husband. “Rabbino,” he says, “give me the keys. I’ll lock up!”

Drawn by the disturbance, a pair of carabinieri appear, flashlights making cones of brightness that sweep through the neighborhood. Apprised of the impending birth, they quickly agree to accompany the signora and her husband to a city hospital a few blocks away.

Renzo appears in time to watch the departure. “It’s legal for me to be out after curfew,” Osvaldo tells him, “but you should get inside.”

Unconcerned, Renzo rearranges himself into a sitting position and leans against the doorpost of the synagogue. “Beautiful evening,” he says, eyes on the strip of night sky visible above them.

Shrugging, Osvaldo sits beside him. “The rabbino looked so surprised,” he muses, looking at the stars. “I suppose you never get used to it. Every baby is a separate miracle.” He lowers his gaze to his companion. “You’re not drunk.”

“Regrettably: no.” Leoni’s heavy-lidded attention remains fixed on the heavens. “Iacopo works very hard for the Jewish community. Who am I to deprive such a man of the deeply satisfying pleasures of sanctimony? Besides,” he adds, “it was a fair assumption. My intemperance is notorious.”

“The rabbi’s wife is a beautiful young woman. His distress is, perhaps, understandable.”

By degrees, Leoni’s regard drops from the stars to the priest at his side. “Signora Soncini is a lady of unimpeachable moral character,” he declares with starchy dignity before confiding, “She threw me over to marry Iacopo, but some men can’t take yes for an answer.”

“There are,” Osvaldo notes, “certain practical advantages to an unmarried clergy. How long have you been awake?”

“How long does it take for milk to spoil? Two days? Three? We’ve got a river of Jews coming over the Maritimes from France, Padre. They thought the war was finished here.” He stretches his legs out in front of him and works at his knees with hands that tremble slightly. “I was giving people rides in Valdottavo and then the fucking gasogene rig fouled—” He stops. “Forgive my language, Padre.”

“Ego te absolvo,” Osvaldo says, wishing bad language were the worst thing he’d been asked to pardon today.

“The peasants up there are taking people in, but they haven’t got shit to share. If the Germans offer a bounty…” Renzo presses his fingers into bloodshot eyes. “Anyway, by the time I got the conduit cleared, I had a shipment of sour cream. My superiors at the dairy were not pleased. I am officially at liberty to seek employment elsewhere.”

“So you wanted to tell the rabbi about the refugees.”

Renzo nods, yawning hugely. “I should get home before Mamma decides I’m dead, rather than merely facedown in a gutter.”

Osvaldo stands. “I want to help.”

“With Mamma? She’s used to this.”

“With the refugees. The ones already in Sant’Andrea. The ones coming over the mountains. I can get your job back— the man who owns the latteria is a parishioner. When Tranquillo Loeb took his family to Switzerland, he entrusted nearly thirty thousand lire to the archbishop’s office for refugees. A milk route will be a good excuse to go from farm to farm. We can distribute the money as we go.”

“We?”

Osvaldo tugs the synagogue door closed, locks it, pockets the key. “There’s a priest up in Valdottavo— an old friend. Leto’s a Catholic Actionist. He’ll help, and there’ll be others. Suora Marta, for one. The sisters can hide people in the convent.”

“Mamma thinks the Communists are the only ones organized enough to oppose the Nazis.” Renzo considers the priest thoughtfully. “Perhaps she’s overlooked a possibility.”

Osvaldo offers Leoni a hand. Even with assistance, Renzo’s rise is an exercise in mechanical engineering, the separate elements of his skeleton carefully arranged on a plumb line between his head and heels, knees unfolding last. Their eyes meet. A pact is made.

“You can live in the basilica,” Osvaldo says. “There’s a storage room we can—”

“Wait. Live in the basilica?”

“Your mother asked me for a room where a man could hide.”

“Ah, but the room is not for me, Padre.” Renzo pulls out an identity card, a pay stub, a half-used ration card. “A friend of mine works for an undertaker. Last week, a Sicilian sailor died of typhus, and Giorgio saved these for me. Had to change the photograph and the occupation, but the rest works. Stefano Savoca’s family lives behind Allied lines down in Sicily, so nobody can check the identity. And I’ve got another set for an ethnic German named Ugo Messner. He died last year. I used to date his sister.”

“Then who…?”

“Giacomo Tura. He’s a sofer—a ritual scribe. Friend of Mamma’s. I suppose I should warn you, Padre. In the absence of male supervision, my mother has become a revolutionary. The Communists say they’ll give women the vote.”

By late Monday afternoon, the cleaning supplies have been removed, leaving a faint chemical smell in the basilica storeroom. Painted shutters have been pried loose, and the single window fitted with a good, heavy blackout curtain. Along one wall, an iron bedstead waits, its mattress covered by pressed white linens, overlain by a blue woolen blanket— patched, but with fine stitches. In a corner: a chipped enamel chamber pot draped with a square bleached rag. A washbasin and pitcher, a worn clean towel folded neatly beside. A table fashioned from two bookcases topped by a broad plank. Dominating the center of the small room, at an angle to the window: a slanted drawing board and a high stool.

“It’s spartan, Giacomo,” Lidia Leoni says, “but no one will think to look for you here.”

“The sisters will watch for trouble,” Suora Marta assures him.

“Is there anything else you need, Signor Tura?” Rina Dolcino asks.

The sofer inspects a miniature forest of brushes, quills, and pens rising from glass jars. His gnarled fingers walk in the air above the tools of his trade. Kneaded erasers, cleaning pads, sponges, tapes. Little piles of parchment trimmings that can be turned into glue to restore other documents. Rows of small bottles filled with colored inks. The ladies have smuggled in the entire contents of his studio, including two chunks of Jerusalem limestone that serve as paperweights. He perches on the stool, adjusts the drawing table to a better angle. “I could use more light. My eyes aren’t so good anymore.”

The ladies think. “Mirrors?” Lidia suggests. “To reflect the light from the window.”

“Of course!” says Suora Marta. “We have no mirrors in Immacolata, grazie a Dio, but—”

“I’ll bring one,” Rina Dolcino promises quickly. She’s seen Signor Tura coming and going from the synagogue for years, but they have never spoken, beyond wishing one another ’n giorno. The scribe is a small man, bent from his work, but he has a fine head of white hair and intelligent eyes. The age Rina’s husband would have been, if the sugar disease hadn’t taken him… She blinks and pulls a set of documents from her handbag. “These are the newest, Signor Tura. My brother just got them from the office in Genoa. He’ll stay off the street until you’re done.”

Surprisingly nimble, Giacomo hops off the stool and steps to the window. Holding the identity card to the light, he studies the paper, the printing, the signatures. “I’ll have a set of blanks for the engraver by the end of the week. How will you get photos, Lidia?”

“The Catholics who took over Emanuele’s studio— they’re helping.”

“You’ll need the stamps,” Giacomo reminds her.

“We’re working on that.”

The three women bid him good-bye. Lidia exits briskly, but Ferdinando Dolcino’s widow allows her hand to linger in the scribe’s a moment longer than absolutely necessary. She is, Giacomo notices, still quite a striking woman, but before the thought can go further, Suora Marta takes her by the elbow and turns her toward the hallway. Rina flashes a smile over her shoulder. The door clicks shut.

Giacomo sits on the bed. The mattress is thin, but he can’t fault the nuns’ hospitality. He hasn’t eaten this well since before his wife died.

Outside, a cloud drifts eastward, and a shaft of sunlight makes the ink bottles sparkle. Crimson, grass green, cobalt blue. Gold and silver. Sepia and coal black. With such colors, Giacomo Tura has spent a lifetime documenting the happy events of the Jewish community: illuminating marriage contracts, birth announcements, creating invitations to b’nai mitzvah and weddings. But he is also a skilled conservator. With bits of paper and parchment collected for decades, he can repair a medieval manuscript’s torn corner, mend a gaping hole in a seventeenth-century ketuba. Once he even restored a family photograph spoiled in a flood.

Lifting the German document again, the sofer studies the color and density of the paper, the ink, the script. Yes, he thinks, laying it aside. I can reproduce this.

He washes his hands. Struggles into the midnight blue scribal tunic. Settles a kippah onto his head to remind himself that his work is sacred. “We write the Torah for life, for continuity,” his master told him when Giacomo was an apprentice. “Before beginning our task, we blot out the name of Amalek, the biblical enemy of Israel. Thus, we remember the prophesy: our enemies shall pass, and we live.” Humming absently, Giacomo selects a tiny piece of parchment from among the remnants. Inscribes on it, in the vowelless Hebrew, the consonants of Amalek’s name. Crosses them out with two lines, crushes the parchment in his palm.

This much is tradition, but he takes up a second snippet of parchment. Smiling grimly at his innovation, Giacomo Tura writes four more letters: HTLR. These he crosses out three times, and then he burns the scrap.